Los Angeles Immigration Law Blog

One of the most important issues in immigration law has been resolved, at least temporarily, by a recent decision of the U. S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The issue is whether immigrants seeking asylum in the United States have the right to appeal the denial of their requests in federal courts. The court's decision turned on the constitutionality of a 1996 federal law that was intended to prevent such appeals.

The case arose when a native of Sri Lanka, who belonged to the ethnic minority Tamil, was arrested in Los Angeles shortly after arriving in this country. The man fled from Sri Lanka to Mexico and then entered the United States from Mexico. When he attempted to enter the United States, he was arrested by a border patrol officer 25 yards north of the border. The immigration officer who interviewed him after the arrest made a finding that the man lacked a credible fear of persecution in Sri Lanka, and his request for asylum was denied by an immigration judge. He has been detained in an immigration facility for two years.

More deficiencies in the Trump Administration's handling of immigrant detainees were revealed in a report by the Office of California Attorney General Xavier Becerra. The audit of immigrant detention centers was begun about a year ago, and its findings provide a deeper look into the treatment of immigrants awaiting a determination of their deportation status.

According to the report, which was intended to obtain information about every day operations at the detention centers, 74,000 immigrant detainees from more than 150 countries have been imprisoned at the 10 public and private detention centers in California. All of the centers were inspected by the attorney general's office. The average length of confinement for an individual was more than 50 days. One person was reported to have been kept in a detention center for more than four years.

President Trump unilaterally shut down the federal government for 35 days to demonstrate his displeasure with the refusal of Congressional Democrats to provide funding for the border wall that was the centerpiece of his election campaign. Now that the shutdown is over, impartial experts looking at court records made an ironic discovery: the President's fit of pique allowed more than 80,000 undocumented immigrants to remain in the country.

Removal hearings are frequently scheduled months or even years in advance. The current backlog of cases requiring a hearing is over 800,000. When the system becomes plugged by an event, such as the government shutdown, the canceled hearings cannot simply be rescheduled for a week or two after the shutdown ends. Many cases must be rescheduled for months, if not years, in the future. The immigrants whose cases were necessarily rescheduled have, in effect, been allowed to remain in the country without any documentation for months or years.

President Trump's enthusiasm for a border wall has drawn much attention to Washington, D.C., but along the border itself, other issues also call for attention. The Border Patrol and other agencies that monitor immigration are struggling with outdated facilities that cannot handle the increase in families wishing to enter the U.S. The immigration court system is so clogged with applications that people are waiting years for decisions to resolve their cases.

The current congressional debate seems to concentrate on raw numbers and ignores the reality faced by immigrant families in Southern California and elsewhere. Seldom mentioned is the fact that the backlog in immigration court has more than doubled to 1.1 million cases awaiting decisions. More families and children traveling alone now elect to surrender to border patrol officials and seek asylum, instead of following the much older pattern of entering the country by any means possible.